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What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else?
Mary Gaitskill -
People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it.
Mary Gaitskill
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I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
Mary Gaitskill -
I don't think that the Internet creates feelings that aren't there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games - what has disturbed me about them - is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release.
Mary Gaitskill -
I didn't start thinking about what I wanted to do professionally until I was 17. I was a hippie, but I did write.
Mary Gaitskill -
Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
Mary Gaitskill -
Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.
Mary Gaitskill -
I found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.
Mary Gaitskill
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I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons.
Mary Gaitskill -
She brightened. 'Last week I ran a personal ad in the Guardian. I answered a few too. I'm not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me.'
Mary Gaitskill -
I remember back in the '90s, I used to feel criticized by women for not having children. Like there must be something wrong with me.
Mary Gaitskill -
It's true that your environment influences how you write.
Mary Gaitskill -
I didn't like horses when I was a kid.
Mary Gaitskill